http://snippets.bentasker.i2p/posts/misc/selecting-subattributes-based-on-substrings.html
<channel>[a-z,0-9,-]+)\\\"" , "i" ) .channel Usage Example JSON_STR = '[{"ID": "1", "Name": "obj1", "prop1" : "foo\nbar\nchannel: \"sed\"\nzoo"}, {"ID": "2", "Name": "obj2", "prop1" : "foo\nbar\nchannel: \"\"\nzoo"}, {"ID": "3", "Name": "obj2", "prop1" : "foo\nbar\n\nzoo"}, {"ID": "4", "Name": "obj2", "prop1" : "foo\nbar\nchannel: \"zoo\"\nzoo"}]' # Items containing channel: echo " $JSON_STR " | jq '.[] | select(.prop1 | contains("channel: "))' # Items not containing channel echo "...